by Tapper, Jake
A song began blaring from behind them; Charlie turned to see the Golden Horseshoe, an ersatz saloon that was currently serving as a very real one. They walked up the porch and looked inside, where a burlesque singer dressed as a cowgirl regaled the audience with a song.
“A miner from the Klondike came a-strollin’ in the place,” she sang. “With nuggets in his knapsack and whiskers on his face. He said, ‘A kiss I crave,’ and I said, ‘Sir! Not until you shave!’ A lady has to mind her P’s and Q’s!”
The saloon was packed with drunken men and girls who could be their daughters or granddaughters.
“Do you see her?” Lawford asked.
“No,” said Charlie. “Not here.”
They stepped back from the saloon doors.
“We probably shouldn’t act as if we’re looking for someone,” Davis said. “We should blend.”
“If we really want to blend, we need to grab girls,” Lawford said. Seeing Charlie’s and Davis’s alarmed faces, he quickly added: “I don’t mean that literally. I’m just saying, we’re sore thumbs here. Especially Sammy.”
“Hey!” said Davis.
“What’s over there?” Charlie asked, nodding to the river, beyond which sat Tom Sawyer Island, festooned with tiki torches, bubbling with human activity. He walked over and onto the dock, where an immense steamboat sat still in the man-made river, bathed in moonlight. Lawford and Davis joined him. In the distance came the faint deep beating of shamanic drums.
“It sounds like the climax of Sergeants Three over there,” Lawford said.
“The pornographic version, maybe,” Davis said. “Our version doesn’t have full-frontal.”
“The version in my trailer did,” said Lawford. “Firewater, squaw, smoke-um big peace pipe.”
“Different kind of climax, Peter,” Davis said.
Charlie looked back at Tom Sawyer’s Island. He heard a woman’s laugh echoing across the water. He knew exactly why he was there: If he could save Violet, he could redeem himself with Margaret. And then he could quit drinking and get his dad out of jail and be the man Margaret believed he could be. Not this other man, the one he was on his way to becoming.
“We need to get over there,” he said.
Chapter Twenty
Los Angeles, California
April 1962
Margaret drove slowly on Sunset trying to spot where Charlotte Goode lived. It was two thirty in the morning.
“I think this is it,” Margaret said, pulling the car to the curb and hopping out. Sheryl Ann Gold sleepily followed her, probably trying to will herself into the right state of mind for the potentially dangerous situation before them. As soon as Charlotte’s phone had gone dead, Margaret called Sheryl Ann and pleaded for her company.
Goode’s house sat behind a row of palm trees. The front door, beneath a brick porch, was bracketed by lanterns, now dark.
“I can’t see anything,” said Sheryl Ann.
Margaret took out her cigarette lighter and held it in front of her; she could make out a stairwell leading to a cellar door.
“This must be it,” she whispered.
She walked slowly down the steps, at the bottom of which the door was ajar. Margaret looked back at Sheryl Ann, then slowly pushed it open and felt around on the wall for the light switch.
The room inside had been turned upside down: pillows gutted, cushions torn apart, papers strewn, drawers open. Margaret and Sheryl Ann cautiously stepped through the small living room. The kitchen was just as torn up—cabinets emptied onto the floor and the oven and refrigerator left open, casting light onto the disarray. Margaret kept walking, quietly, to the bedroom; she steeled herself before turning on the light, glancing over her shoulder and feeling a reassuring pat from Sheryl Ann.
Margaret turned on the light.
Charlotte Goode lay on her bed, her eyes and mouth open. Her shirt and the sheets were smeared with blood.
“Je-sus,” exclaimed Sheryl Ann, jumping back.
Oh no, Margaret thought. Oh God, no. Her heart began to race. She ran to the bed and felt Charlotte’s neck for a pulse.
There was none.
Margaret felt as if her insides were being torn out. She started to cry. Sheryl Ann put her arms around her, attempting to comfort her. After a minute had passed, Sheryl Ann patted Margaret on the shoulder to bring her back to the urgency of the moment, not just its tragedy.
“We should call the police,” Sheryl Ann said. “Where’s the phone?”
Margaret looked around the room, then back at Goode. “It’s around her neck,” Margaret said, pointing to the cord that circled Goode’s throat and trailed onto the floor on the other side of the bed.
Sheryl Ann walked around the bed, picked up the receiver that dangled at the end of the cord, and lifted it to her ear. “No dial tone,” she said.
Margaret looked down at Charlotte. She noticed weird blood smears on the sheet near her right hand. Circles and lines. She ran around to the far side of the bed to take a closer look.
The Mark Twain Steamboat was anchored for the night, but Davis noted that a Tom Sawyer Island motorized raft appeared to be bringing some guests from the island. The raft could fit thirty visitors, but the captain was depositing only four back on the mainland, two men and two girls. The men were in their sixties, tripping and stumbling, wearing coonskin caps, guffawing and grasping at their dates. The two girls were done up in raunchy Disney-squaw garb—fringed leather bikinis and skirts, eagle feathers, braids.
“All aboard!” said the raft operator, a young man in an unkempt country-boy Huck Finn costume.
“I’m way too sober,” Lawford said as they all climbed on.
“We have heap big firewater on the island,” the raft operator said robotically, cranking up the motor and steering the craft to Tom Sawyer Island.
“It’s weird how no one seems to notice you two,” Charlie said. “I mean, not only no autograph requests, but it’s as if they don’t recognize you!”
“No one notices anyone because this event isn’t happening, man,” Davis observed. “You’re not here, I’m not here, no one is here.” The raft operator nodded approvingly.
As they chugged forward, Charlie could see more of the island, some of which was illuminated by tiki torches and lanterns. A fishing pier sat by the docks, adjacent to an old mill, and off in the distance at the northern tip sat what appeared to be a cabin on fire. Beyond the party sounds of music, murmurs, and revelry came the rhythmic warpath drumbeats of the Ugga-Wugga Wigwam tribe from Peter Pan.
The operator tied the raft to a post in the Tom’s Landing dock and as Charlie disembarked, he noticed shapes on the muddy shore illuminated in the moonlight. It was a young woman on her back, naked from the waist up, gazing patiently if dead-eyed into the sky, and a big, broad, heavy, hairy man on top of her.
The sight transported Charlie back to a night in France during the war. Along with the rest of First Battalion, 175th Infantry, Charlie landed at Omaha Beach on June 17, 1944. He and Company K seized Isigny-sur-Mer, secured the bridge over the Vire River, recaptured Saint-Lô, and proceeded northeast. By late August, Charlie and his weathered platoon had reached a bank on the eastern estuary of the Seine River southwest of the Pays de Caux. The nearby city, German-occupied Le Havre, was France’s biggest channel port, and beginning in the early evening of September 5, the Royal Air Force dropped almost ten thousand tons of bombs on the town, destroying more than 80 percent of the buildings and killing two thousand French civilians. Soon, from the ocean, the monitor HMS Erebus and battleship HMS Warspite began pummeling the port town with more than four thousand long tons of shells.
Charlie and Company K had watched it all in horror, hiding in the woods a kilometer away. On September 12, the British and Canadian forces entered Le Havre, and the Germans surrendered. Six days later, Charlie was with the American forces entering the town, a trek through rubble and concrete, over glass and viscera. The troops had to cover their noses with scarves and rags to avo
id the stench of rotting carrion. Most of the townspeople were homeless, and food was scarce. The citizens of Le Havre had been pulled quickly into degraded states. They were focused solely on survival, with only the occupying forces to try to keep order.
Charlie had spent only five days at Le Havre, but he spent much of the next decade trying to forget what he saw. Starting with what he found when he followed the sound of a mournful wail into what had once been a storage facility for the hospital. He had assumed someone was dying and needed help. He ducked into the rubble and entered a dark room barely illuminated by a flickering lantern. Squinting, he approached two shapes that turned out to be a large man in fatigues—he couldn’t tell which army—humping a young girl, barely pubescent. Charlie recoiled, then stepped closer. The girl wasn’t actually moving. He kicked the soldier off her, and the man grunted, stunned, having not even known Charlie was in the room. Charlie knelt next to the girl.
She wasn’t breathing.
What’s more, she was cold to the touch. She had been dead for some time.
Charlie backed away, horrified at his realization, as the soldier quickly ran out of the rubble.
What have we become? Charlie wondered.
Or maybe the question was even more disturbing than that: Is the war only now revealing what we have always truly been?
Now, without thinking, Charlie jumped down into the mud, took the man by his throat, pulled him off the girl, and threw him onto his back. His eyes met the man’s, and Charlie thought, for a moment, about crushing his skull. The frustration of these past months surged in him, this disoriented feeling he couldn’t shake and his anger at himself for his own stupidity and laziness. He caught his breath, then said to the man through clenched teeth, “Get out of my sight before I fucking kill you.”
The man stood up, shirtless, shocked, and terrified. He grabbed the waist of his pants and, without looking back at the girl, sprinted for his life. Charlie watched him for a moment, then knelt to help the girl. She skittered away from him, eyes wide, then stood, hauled the skirt of her dress over one shoulder, and took off.
Charlie sank to his knees in the mud.
“Charlie, boyo, you okay?” Lawford asked, gently shaking his shoulder.
He didn’t know what had just happened.
Charlie looked to the docks of Tom Sawyer Island. “Sorry,” he said. “It reminded me of the war.”
It took him another second before he fully rejoined his friends.
“Bad memories, man,” Davis said. “They can pop up and block everything else out. Like Nosferatu, man.”
“Let’s just focus on your niece for tonight,” Lawford suggested. “And not try to save every woman in Disneyland.”
They walked from the docks, passed a giant faux Old Mill to their left, and proceeded straight down a row of tiki torches as if headed to a Hawaiian wedding, signs beckoning them to stray and explore other sights: Injun Joe’s Cave, Smuggler’s Cove, Tom and Huck’s Treehouse.
Three lanky, skinny teenage girls walked toward them, dressed as stereotypical squaws.
“…said he had the opportunity of a lifetime for me,” one of them was saying. “He said he would introduce me to the most important man I could meet.”
They were young and blond and gawky. It was difficult to see their faces in the dark, but they resembled so many Hollywood teens, girls with big Keane-painting eyes. They noticed Lawford and Davis, did double takes, and approached them.
“You boys going to Fort Wilderness?” one of them asked.
“What’s that, doll?” Davis said. The words were characteristic Sammy Davis charm, but to Charlie they rang hollow, suggesting the singer was maybe as nervous as he was.
Davis put a cigarette in his mouth and was about to light it when the girl closest to him reached over and took it. He lit it for her, then held out the pack for the other two to partake. As they leaned toward the lighter, Charlie got a better look at their faces. Kids, he thought. They were just kids.
The first one took a drag of the cigarette, exhaled, then said: “Fort Wilderness is where all the fun is happening. Keep going down the lane.”
“Do you know a girl named Violet?” Charlie asked. “About your age, from Ohio?”
The three girls looked at each other, rolled their eyes, and laughed.
“There are a lot of girls there,” said the first. “Dunno names. We’re heading to the treehouse, there’s reefer there.” They tee-heed and ran off.
“Jesus, it’s past their bedtime,” Davis said.
“Weird that no one has asked if we belong here,” Charlie noted.
“When you’re famous, no one stops you to ask questions,” said Lawford.
The three men continued down the dark path, the sounds of music, drums, and revelry growing louder.
Sheryl Ann cautioned Margaret to slow down as they proceeded east on Sunset.
“We can’t get pulled over,” she said, looking at the dashboard clock: 3:04.
They had rushed out of Charlotte Goode’s basement apartment, walked briskly to the car, and tore down the street.
“Should we call the police?” Sheryl Ann asked.
“Why? To bring her back to life?” Margaret said. She’d retreated into pure survival mode. “I’m worried about them placing us at the scene. LAPD is already trying to frame us.” She took her foot off the gas pedal.
“The sooner LAPD gets there, the better the chance they have of finding her killer,” Sheryl Ann said.
Margaret considered that. She spotted a phone booth near an empty corner, pulled over, and called the cops. After giving them the address and saying she suspected wrongdoing, she hung up. Next she called Addington White, reversing the charges. When he answered, she offered a quick description of what she’d seen, save for the clue Charlotte had apparently written on the sheet with her own blood. White thanked her for the call and assured her he’d have field agents from the FBI’s Los Angeles office head there at once.
Back in the car, Sheryl Ann directed Margaret to their destination as best she could figure it out: Sunset to Highland to Hollywood Boulevard to Beachwood Drive. The fancy homes they whizzed by came in four styles: Spanish, Mediterranean, French Normandy, English Tudor. One after the other, like the repetitive backgrounds of Bugs Bunny cartoons to which Frankenheimer had once referred.
“Why are you so convinced we need to do this?” Sheryl Ann asked.
“Charlotte told me she had documents that were shocking that she’d taken from the locked file cabinets at work,” Margaret said. “She must not have brought them to her home, though. I’m certain that’s what they were looking for when they killed her.”
“But why are we going to the Hollywood sign?”
“The H she drew in blood on the sheet,” Margaret said. “And her obsession with Peg Entwistle, who jumped from it.”
“Take a left here on Ledgewood,” Sheryl Ann said. “And we’re going to take a quick right to get to Mulholland. How good a hiker are you?”
“I wouldn’t call the incline from the Lower East Side to the Upper East Side particularly steep,” Margaret said. “Except socially.”
They hit the end of the road, parked, and hopped out of the car. The sign was lit above them, but beyond that the mountain was dark. So as to not trip on rocks and brambles, Margaret illuminated the ground in front her of her with her cigarette lighter while Sheryl Ann followed. Behind them, the lights of downtown Los Angeles shimmered as the two women began to scramble up the canyon to the Hollywood sign. They felt as distant and remote as the stars above them.
Chapter Twenty-One
Anaheim, California
April 1962
Charlie felt nauseated. On their way to Fort Wilderness, he and the Rat Packers kept coming across middle-aged lechers and their victims rolling in the fake flora. It was impossible to tell the women who might be willing participants from the girls—children, really. And it was difficult to reconcile the debauched criminality with the Disneyness of the s
etting: the wholesome plastic artifice, the aggressive Americana, and the bland mainstream music, including the song emanating from the fort right now—“Wringle Wrangle,” from the Disney Western Westward Ho the Wagons!
With a dollar’s worth of beans, a new pair of jeans, got a woman to cook and wash and things, blared the recording of Fess Parker, who’d acted in the film as well as played the lead in Disney’s erstwhile Davy Crockett show.
“Remember this song?” Davis asked Lawford.
“’Course,” Lawford said.
“Whatever happened to ol’ Fess?” Davis asked.
“He wanted to play more than cowboys, but Uncle Walt only saw him with chaps,” Lawford said. “He refused to do some picture with a bit part, and that was that. Haven’t seen him since.”
“Can’t be a starter if you won’t play ball,” Davis observed.
Their trail veered right and suddenly Fort Wilderness was before them. Constructed out of ponderosa pine logs as if it were an actual U.S. outpost in Texas, the fort sat atop a bluff on the western bank of the island, adjacent to an ersatz Missouri River. Four men stood at the gate dressed as U.S. Army soldiers from the early 1800s, around the time of the campaign against the Creek Indians. Seemingly working for whoever was throwing the party, they nodded to Charlie as he led the group in.
Charlie, Lawford, and Davis stood and surveyed the decadence. Across the fort grounds were girls who looked like they should have been preparing for JV cheerleading tryouts paired off with men who looked like their fathers or grandfathers. Bonfires flickered, illuminating the parade ground as Charlie searched for Violet. A staircase led to a porch; beyond the parade ground stood a graveyard, some teepees, and, in the distance, the burning cabin they’d seen from the river, the controlled flames on its roof purposely fed by propane.
Some laughed or sang, the men in cowboy gear, the girls in Indian leather playing their parts as dutiful conquests. Waiters in army uniforms brought them drinks in copper tankards.